The Return: The 'captivating and deeply moving' Number One bestseller

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This book has expectations to be epic but the sad reality is that it looks like a book written by a tourist who wanted to stage some kind of story in a place she fancied. Hislop's heroes are trying to survive - not always with success - through all these difficult times. Their lives get tangled up with each other's history and the author does a really good job in unfolding her characters during such an era. As a youthful woman, her rage emanating from corroborators of the Nazi regime forces her to join the communists.

So when bedlam characterizes the island as a result of a Greek coup, the Turkish Army is sent to protect their people living in Famagusta. Among them are the Georgious and the Özkan families which moved there following years of ethnic turmoil on other parts of the island. When Hislop was 30, she discovered a secret that changed her perspective on life – her parents had had another daughter before she was born. One evening during an interval at the theatre – her father had by then remarried and had two younger children to whom she’s now close – he referred in passing to having had five children. She knew of only four. Like the heroine of The Return, Hislop originally went to Granada to learn to dance because she wanted to write a novel about dance; then, like Sonia, she stumbled across stories about the civil war. “I love music and I love to dance. I even dance in my kitchen when I’m cooking. Her characters were completely flat. Good or bad, evil or moral. Poor or rich. There was no in-between and very little gray area. As others have mentioned - the rich were generally seen as corrupt and unsympathetic while the poor were honest, hardworking and loving.When Helena inherits her grand-parents' apartment, she discovers an array of priceless antiquities. How did her grandfather amass them - and what human price was paid for them? The Thread is set in Thessaloniki, Greece and follows the slow-burning romance between Katerina and Dimitri, the former a poor refugee from Asia Minor, the latter the son of a wealthy textile merchant. While Katerina supports her family as an expert seamstress, Dimitri angers his father by siding with the resistance against the occupying German forces in World War II, as the city, once devastated by fire, is torn apart by the Nazi persecution of its thriving Jewish community. This cookie is stored by WPML WordPress plugin. The purpose of the cookie is to store the redirected language. The idea came out of a conversation with some school teachers in Crete.” said Victoria “They commented that there were so many themes in the story that were as relevant to children as to adults but felt that the original novel was a little too grown-up for many of them. I realised that much of the book is actually about children and their experiences of stigma and loss, so this has been a wonderful experience for me, to look at things through their eyes. Writing for children requires a whole different set of skills and I hope they will enjoy reading it.”

Thessaloniki, 1917. As Dimitri Komninos is born, a fire sweeps through the thriving multicultural city, where Christians, Jews and Moslems live side by side. It is the first of many catastrophic events that will change for ever this city, as war, fear and persecution begin to divide its people. Five years later, young Katerina escapes to Greece when her home in Asia Minor is destroyed by the Turkish army. Losing her mother in the chaos, she finds herself on a boat to an unknown destination. From that day the lives of Dimitri and Katerina become entwined, with each other and with the story of the city itself. Although Sofia only reveals that she was raised in a tiny Cretan village before moving to London, she eventually decides to help her daughter learn more by giving her a letter to take to an old friend in Crete. A warm, lively conversationalist, she is no stranger to long-buried secrets herself and it’s tempting to play the amateur psychologist and suggest that this is why she writes so well about such matters since they echo her own past.Now that she has children herself – Emily (18) and William (15) – she finds her father’s behaviour even more inexplicable, especially since her husband is such a devoted father, despite the fact that their children are both so bright and eloquent neither he nor his wife can ever win an argument at home. “We always lose in the battle of words,” she laughs. Ultimately captured and imprisoned in the infamous islands of Makronisos and Trikeri, Themis is forced to make a life-changing decision. Thessaloniki, 2007. A youthful Anglo-Greek is desperate to make a decision after learning about his grandparents. They wound their way through a labyrinth of streets, partly following their noses, partly the orientation of the map. Jardines, Mirasol, Cruz, Puentezuelas, Capuchinas... The Return is every bit as gripping as The Island, and is impossible to read without a box of Kleenex by your side. It tells of Sonia Cameron, who is unhappily married to a “dusty” husband, with a serious drink problem. Oblivious to the past, she travels to Moorish Granada, with a wild-child girlfriend, in search of escape and salsa lessons.

Any emotions or feelings the characters had was told rather than shown (and sometimes neither). Thus it was very hard to identify with them.Roman započinje pričom o velikom požaru koji je pogodio Solun 1917.godine i proteže do sve do današnjice. Kako je taj požar odredio sudbine mnogih porodica, kako hrišćanskih, tako i muslimanskih, tako je i dolazak ll Svjetskog rata pogodio solunske Jevreje. Grad koji je nekada bio zajednica svih vjera, samo je u nekoliko godina to prestao biti, muslimani su protjerani u Tursku, a Jevreji su protjerani u poljske logore početkom ll Svjetskog rata. U vrtlogu tih povijesnih dešavanja pratimo sudbine različih porodica, različitih statusa i vjera. These educational resources carefully and sensitively explore curriculum-based themes such as prejudice, isolation, discrimination, and most importantly, hope. I really enjoyed The Thread, and am giving it five stars -- not because it is a literary treasure, but rather because it does such a good job at historical fiction. I learned so much about the history of Thessalonika and modern Greece in general, and enjoyed myself while reading. One enterprising couple is on the verge of launching the most striking hotel in a region where Greek and Turkish Cypriots live in peace.